Download category: Working paper

Cooking Health Energy Environment and Gender (CHEEG) – guiding Covid recovery plans

Batchelor, S. and Brown, E. (2020). Cooking Health Energy Environment and Gender (CHEEG) - guiding Covid recovery plans. MECS programme working paper. In this paper, Dr Batchelor and Prof Brown argue that in a world that is considering how it will recover from the first wave of the Covid 19 virus and how it will live with its ongoing impacts, utilizing Covid 19 recovery plans to accelerate the transition of those who use biomass for cooking to modern energy cooking services could be a very effective strategy with multiple gains.  It presents the idea that if we focus on the intersectional nature of recovery plans, we can leverage existing and recovery finance to lower the impact of subsequent waves of the virus on women and children, improve our economic responses to the emerging global recession, accelerate responses to climate change and make rapid gains on three sustainable development goals; Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages, SDG 5 Gender equity and SDG 7, access to reliable, sustainable, affordable modern energy for all (inclusive of their cooking needs). There is an urgency and an opportunity in this. The need for Covid recovery plans is an opportunity to create equitable economic recovery that puts women in the foreground, rethinking our approach to this intersectional space.

Ethiopia; Cooking transitions. An analysis of Multi-Tier Framework Data for insights into transitions to modern energy cooking

Ethiopia - Beyond Connections” (Padam et al 2018), presents a diagnostic by our partners ESMAP World Bank of the multi-tier framework data from Ethiopia.  The multi-tier framework is an approach to understand the nuances of energy use both for electricity and clean cooking, and to work towards a greater degree of understanding than existing national data sets can reach. Ethiopia was one of the first to undertake the survey, and the data set and the report were intended to set a new standard in data collection. In this working paper we explore the data for linkages between groups of households and across the electricity, clean cooking divide exploring for insights on transitions to modern energy cooking. Our particular interest lies in the use of electricity for cooking, and Ethiopia is an outlier in Sub Saharan Africa in that it has a significant proportion of its urban population using electricity for cooking. In particular we relate the cooking fuel demographics to household use of electricity, what influences household electric cooking choices and summarise some key learning points on ‘transition’.